On the night of the joyous festival of Shemini
Atzeret of the Jewish year 5738 (October 4, 1977), while celebrating
with thousands of his Chassidim in his synagogue, the Rebbe suffered
a massive heart attack. Following that episode the Rebbe was confined
to his office, and it was not until five weeks later, on the first
day of the Hebrew month of Kislev, that he returned home. This date
was duly designated by his Chassidim as a day of celebration and
thanksgiving.

The doctors had warned the Rebbe of a sixty percent
chance re-occurrence if he continued his vigorous daily routine.
But the Rebbe heard positive news: The doctors were of the opinion
that there's a forty percent chance that there's nothing to worry
about.

Two years earlier, in the summer of 1976, a group
of disabled Israeli war veterans touring America on a program sponsored
by the Israeli Defense Ministry came to the Rebbe. Ten large commercial
vans transported their wheelchairs from their New York hotel to
the Rebbe’s synagogue at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn.

For several minutes the Rebbe walked among them,
shaking hands, smiling and making light conversation. Then he addressed
them, apologizing for his accented Hebrew.

“If a person has been deprived of a limb
or a faculty,” he said, “this itself indicates that
G-d has given him special powers to overcome the limitations this
entails, and to surpass the achievements of ordinary people. You
are not disabled or handicapped, but special and unique, as you
possess potentials that the rest of us do not. I therefore suggest
that you should no longer be referred to as ‘disabled’,
but as ‘special’, which more aptly describes what is
unique about you.”

In 1976, the benefits of such an approach had yet
to be widely disseminated, and the official nomenclature for challenged
persons, even among doctors and therapists, was still couched in
negative terms. But the Rebbe was applying an generations-old Chassidic
dictum: “Think positive, and it will be positive.”

Indeed, the face that the Rebbe showed the men
who had lost their limbs in the defense of their people was warm,
cheerful and optimistic. A number of them later said that this was
the first time since their injury that they were met with such a
natural response from another person, rather than a look of pity,
guilt or revulsion. But when the Rebbe returned to his room, his
personal secretary saw how shattered he was by the encounter. It
was a full week, the secretary later told, before the Rebbe recovered
from the experience.